The day before Christmas Professor Samuel P. Huntington died. That name doesn’t mean a lot to most people, but anyone who has had at least a casual exposure to the social sciences has at least run across Huntington’s name. Huntington deserves to be remembered not just for the lives of the students he touched but for the contribution he made and still can make to political thinking.

It would be nice if our political leaders would read Huntington, and if they did, they would heed him. I know Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has read Huntington. She is a political science PhD and a rough contemporary of mine. She could not have escaped reading Huntington in graduate school. That is how important his writings are. But while she’s been enormously successful at least in her career, it can’t be because she paid much attention to Huntington. And that is to the detriment of us all. Much of the foreign policy of which she is an architect is the antithesis of Huntington’s central thesis.

I first read Huntington’s Political Order in Changing Societies as an undergraduate and was struck by how much sense the author made even as he challenged the romantic notion that democratic governance is a natural outgrowth of economic development. Huntington’s thesis is that societies as they evolve do not necessarily become more democratic. That is a lesson we should have learned before we entered Iraq and that is a lesson the Israelis know all too well as they battle Hamas.

Hamas was elected in what the international community called a free and fair election. Perhaps that is true in the sense that the mechanics of the election were pretty much in line with international standards. But the idea that the Palestinian Government in the West Bank or in Gaza for that matter is a democratic one is preposterous. Hamas and Fatah are a couple of gangs engaged in a turf war. Does anyone think that a party in the mold of a Western liberal party that advocated women’s rights, freedom of expression and the rule of law would have a chance in the Palestinian political environment? The leaders of such a party would be assassinated the minute they opened their mouths. You can’t tell me that in Palestine nobody believes in those things; and, yet, there is no outlet for expression of those ideals. The government of Hamas is as much a dictatorship as Mugabe’s Zimbabwe or Putin’s Russia. An election does not a democracy make.

This brings to mind another of Huntington’s important works, The Clash of Civilizationsand the Remaking of World Order. In that book, Huntington suggests that the Cold War between the Soviet Union and the United States will be replaced by a world wide clash of ideologies; between liberal democratic notions of the “West” and reactionary, authoritarian notions of the “East.” Be it in Russia, China or the Northwest territories of Pakistan, the rights of man are not universally accepted, and the West is seen as an intractable enemy that can only be pacified as it is destroyed.

The flashpoints of this struggle are in Zimbabwe, along the truce line in Korea, along the Indian border with Pakistan, along the Russian border with Eastern European and even in parts of South America. Israel is not just at war with Hamas, it is at war with the enemies of all of us who love freedom. Unfortunately, the Palestinian (and Israeli) people are caught in the crossfire. But we shouldn’t misplace our sympathies for the plight of innocent combatants with a sympathy for the enemies of the rights of man; and we shouldn’t fool ourselves into thinking that they are anything else but. We are taught here in the West to tolerate the opinions of those with whom we disagree but we cannot tolerate ideologies and traditions that are not just anathema but a threat to us all.

Thus, it is difficult for us in the West to dismiss Hamas’ enunciation of Palestinian “grievances” as a sham because there are legitimate claims to recompense to be made by the Palestinian people. But the fact that Hamas, or Hezbollah, or Fatah or the President of Iran hide behind the Palestinian people (both figuratively and literally as human shields) makes their actions all the more repugnant. This is what Huntington teaches us, and this is what from his work should be taken to heart.